DMY BERLIN

This years DMY was held at the Hangar 2 of the Tempelhof airport in Berlin. I took my bike to do the ten minutes ride from my parent’s house to the airport. As I got to the fence of the airfield which I usually have to pass going to the airport, I was amazed to find it open. It´s been awhile like that, but since I rarely get around to Berlin these days I didn´t know it and was thrilled to finally find it open for public.

There were trikes with kites, children inline skating selfmade parcours, an artist painting with a easel,  rc cars and airplanes, soccer games, couples laying in the high grass doing –well, …something, people running and exercising, the oh-so-ubiquitous-berlin-barbeque-family, and I even saw some LARP fanatics beating each other with latex swords. Wicked!

I don´t know if it was witnessing what people were doing on the airfield that altered my perception, but the most interesting DMY projects and lectures to me were the ones which revolved around open source thoughts and projects, and there were quite a few as the main theme of the DMY Symposium was entitled “Are nerds the new designers ?”

Accordingly talks often stressed the point of how crucial it is that people on all sides start thinking out of their silos. The importance of mixed teams between designers and “nerds” (defined then as anyone who is highly specialized in any field or craft) and that both can learn, profit and contribute to one another.

I very much enjoyed the speech of Haiyan Zhang from IDEO as she described technology becoming the new design palette of designers and how they are learning from nerds in terms of their “craft”, and the vice versa nerds are learning from the work processes of the designers.

Check out her video (especially the work process for the monster maker Iphone app is worth watching) –unfortunately of all the speeches I recorded this is the only one with sufficient audio quality. 

…damn I need a new camera.